Pages

Saturday, 19 December 2015

Star Wars Armada Nebulon-B Frigate expansion pack unboxing

Today we are going to take a look at the Rebel Nebulon-B Frigate expansion pack for Star Wars Armada.

The EF76 Nebulon-B escort frigate was a 300-meter-long warship that was built by Kuat Drive Yards for use by the Imperial Navy, to protect convoys from Rebel Alliance starfighter actions. It was, however, used more famously by the Rebellion.

The standard Nebulon-B frigate was armed with twelve turbolasers, twelve laser cannons, and two tractor beam projectors. It was designed to carry twenty-four TIE Series starfighters.
While generally well-armed for a vessel of that size, its midsection connecting spar was a vulnerability. It could be split open by concentrated heavy weapons fire, venting the frigate's atmosphere and killing most of the crew.

Only available before in the core box, you can now get the Nebulon-B Frigate as a separate pack, so lets dive in and see what you get!

The Nebulon-B comes in a similar pack to X-Wing. The art on the package is great, and the label and faction are nice and clear on the front on the packet, which should make things nice and easy for those family members who are not familiar with picking up models

The back gives you an overview of what you get, and some nice background on the ship itself.

When you have fought your way into the packaging, I do recommend a sharp hobby knife you will find it full of goodies. Being Fantasy Flight Games it has lovely high quality tokens, and plenty of them! It includes all the defence tokens you need, shield dials, command dials and tokens and more.

You get the same ship cards from the core set, the Escort Frigate and the Support Frigate. Both are good options depending on how you want to use them, as their firepower is the same between them. The most firepower and shields are front facing, but the sides are fragile, so you want to try to keep them out of arc as much as possible.

We get some new ship titles in the pack. Salvation provides some more punch for your fleet by allowing critical hits when you fire from your front arc to count as 2 hits instead of 1. Yavaris can make your fighters attack twice if they do not move if you reveal a squadron command. This can make her into a powerful carrier for your fighters. Engine Techs can increase your manoeuvrability, you can spend the card to make an extra 1 speed manoeuvre, which can allow you to reposition, which in a ship that can already go speed 3 is good, and also allows you to try and position yourself with the nose pointing at your target to keep those weak sides safe. Engineering team lets you add an extra point of engineering when you take the engineering command. Handy to try and keep your ship up and fighting.

Enhanced Armaments adds an extra red die to your broadside batteries, which is good, but on a ship with such fragile sides I would think about using it on here, though of course it is a useful card to have as it can go on any rebel/imperial ship with the relevant slot. XI7 Turbo Lasers can stop the enemy redirecting any more then 1 damage from the hit hull zone. This is really useful when your firing on those Imperial Star Destroyers as they love to redirect the damage from their front zone.
Intel Officer can help you clear your opponents defence tokens. You can declare a token, and if the enemy uses it they lose it. Defense Liaison provides some flexibility to your response, as you can spend a command token to change your dial to a manoeuvre or repair command, which can prove very useful at the right moment.

The ship comes well packed and secure in plastic packaging with a lid you can remove. I like this a lot, it helps with storage as it provides its only little case, I hope this continues with other ships. You also get the base, peg, all the gubbins you need for shield dials and speed dial and command dials.

Its the same model as the core set, though I am very happy that this one does not have the slight droop that the core set version had due to the way its packaged. Its an easy fix with some heat but still a minor annoyance. The fact they have fixed the packaging for this one makes me happy. The rear section also looks like it has received a better paint job then the core one, though without them side by side its hard to tell.

The paint job is good, and the model is very detailed, I really like this ship, and the different cards make this well worth purchasing to add to your fleet.

All assembled on the base

Still has that engine glow, which is a nice touch that Fantasy Flight Games have added that was missed in X-Wing.

Im looking forward to adding this to the fleet for some support. The ships points are not that expensive so having this and the core se one will always prove useful in bigger games.